


Choices

by CaricatureOfAWitch



Category: The Wicked Years Series - Gregory Maguire, Wicked - All Media Types, Wicked - Schwartz/Holzman
Genre: Character Development, G(a)linda sure changed a lot throughout the story huh, Gen, Oneshot, Pfannee Milla and Shenshen make an appearance, Prompt Fic, as well as very very minor OCs but who cares, character study (I guess?), complete mix-up of book and musical canon but more book-oriented, says gen on the tin bc nothing's actually done or stated, so you could read these witches as platonic but tbh why would you, this is not a Five Times story but it also isn't not that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-25
Updated: 2020-10-25
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:27:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27193085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaricatureOfAWitch/pseuds/CaricatureOfAWitch
Summary: It should have been me. The thought comes unbidden as she finally picks herself off the floor with wobbly legs. If any of the monkeys had remained, they’ve flown off by now, driven away by her noisy and clustery presence in their mistress’s lair. Glinda remains alone as she wipes her face with a dark, rough sleeve that covers her hand up to the fingertips when she lets it fall. She clutches the fabric closer, pretends it feels like another hand in hers.Galinda, or Glinda, throughout various moments of her life, grapples with envy, and the sense of what is deserved -and what isn't.
Relationships: Elphaba Thropp & Galinda Upland, Galinda Upland & various side characters
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	Choices

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much to @thorin-is-a-cuddler on Tumblr, our prompt exchange finally got me to write again and I love you so much. The prompt was "It should have been me," with Elphaba and Glinda, and as a result I accidentally returned to the first fandom I ever published fanfic for, and the pairing that made me realise I'm not remotely straight.
> 
> Elphaba, unfortunately, isn't actually in this.
> 
> (Also I don't know how to format the summary on AO3. How do people make things be in italics? ...actually I barely know how to format anything.)

_She reasoned that because she was beautiful she was significant, though what she signified, and to whom, was not clear to her yet.  
_\- Gregory Maguire, "Wicked. The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West"

**Beauty**

The world is alight with magic. Ruffles and frills in all colours, flitter and glitter and glimmer in the air, the swishy sound of silk and velvet gliding past her, and oh, the _colours_ – Galinda does her best to remain unaffected, but, unseen, her little heart beats a joyful rhythm in her chest. She knows not to let it show. She’s in another league this year, her parents said, no longer grouped in with toddlers and _babies_. Her bearing matters more now, the way she carries herself and the way she looks at her surroundings, it simply won’t _do_ to be caught in childish _wonder_ instead of worldly aloofness. Her mother has taught her well, and Galinda strives to make her proud.

In the dressing room (a collective room, still, only the adults who participate in the really _important_ contests get private dressing rooms, Galinda can’t _wait_ until she’s older), the air is thick with powder, and the glitter that’s so nice and pretty under the open sky is still pretty but makes her sneeze in the stuffed room. Her mother crouches before her and plucks the frills on her dress into place. It’s pale violet, because even though she wanted a pink one, pink is a colour for small children and for young women, not for her, who is something in between. At least she got to keep the small green adornments, and the tiny emeralds in her newly pierced ears.

A large powdery brush is thrust in her face. Galinda flinches back reflexively, and her mother reaches for her shoulder. “Hold still still, darling, I need to fix up your rouge.”

Galinda remembers just in time that nodding assent isn’t holding still, so she does as she is told. A smaller brush follows and dabs colour onto her obligingly closed eyelids. Sticky gloss is spread on her lips. Her mother makes a smacking sound at her, and Galinda smacks back until her lips are evenly sticky all over and her mother passes her a small, pink mirror so she may admire herself.

The two faces beaming back from the oval glass look like they might be one and the same, caught at different moments in time, and they are the prettiest faces in all of Oz.

As they wait for their turn in neat little rows of fluffs and curls, the girl next to Galinda kicks her feet in a rather unbecoming display of boredom. Galinda turns to her and whispers, “don’t do that.”

“Why?” The feet keep kicking, bouncing up and down and up and down. “You can’t tell me what to do.”

“It’s not pretty,” Galinda explains. Her eyes follow the motion like her gaze is glued to the dainty red shoes. “You’ll seem like a child. It’s not _pretty_.” It’s a _beauty_ contest. Why did no one tell this poor girl that she couldn’t do not pretty things at a beauty contest?

The poor girl huffs derisively and swings her foot forward so sharply the shoe nearly flies off. “That’s stupid,” she says. “You’re stupid. Your _dress_ is stupid. No one cares about what I do when you’re not even wearing a pretty dress!”

She doesn’t say it meanly. It’s a mere statement, as though observing a simple fact, and Galinda wants to yell at her that she’s _wrong_ , and her mum _told_ her not to swing her legs because it’s not pretty, can’t she see? But yelling, she knows, is _definitely_ not pretty, and her heart has crawled into her throat and is preventing words from coming out, anyway. She just turns away again and pats down her pretty, purple dress to push it into perfect shape.

On her way home, she knows she should have worn a pink dress. _It should have been me_. The girl who’d sat next to her stepped, no, skipped onto the stage, legs flying in all directions as she introduced herself with a little dance and flourish, her pink dress flaring out beneath the glittering red belt to reveal the glittering red shoes and neat white lace stockings, and the jury was instantly charmed.

Galinda reached second place. Her parents are still gushing over her while she sits in the carriage with her arms crossed and her lips pressed tightly shut to avoid letting out the sadness and anger that are making an unseemly ruckus inside her. They insist they’re proud, and that she is beautiful and did an amazing job, and her mum tells her to maybe be a bit more _lively_ next time, that’s a dear, because Galinda did it wrong and the other girl did it right.

She thinks of red and pink and glitter, and doesn’t try very hard not to wish she had tripped the other girl into the dirt while her legs were too busy flying to look where they were going.

* * *

**Learning**

Shiz is an _experience_. That’s what she writes home in her first letter to her parents, and that’s how, worldly and with _class_ , she talks about it with the other girls. The journey to get there, the wide, imposing halls, the professors and lecturers in all their seriousness, that sober gravity. Truth be told, Galinda thinks it a bit overly intimidating sometimes, and to her shame finds herself actively avoiding areas commonly populated with teachers from Three Queens and Ozma Towers. Secretly she’s become increasingly glad of authority figures like Dr Dillamond and even Mrs Greyling, to whom the term barely seems to apply at all as by her students at large, she is generally considered neither an authority nor much of a figure at all.

None of this makes its way out of Galinda’s innermost thoughts, of course.

She writes to her parents about the sophistication of her classes, and about the other colleges’ occupants merely with regards to marriage prospects. (Boq doesn’t feature in her letters, neither in praise nor ridicule, for both feel wrong whenever she attempts, and her attempts usually end with her quill thrown down in a huff. No reason to waste her thoughts on a Munchkin.)

She gossips about Avaric with Shenshen, adopts the same blend of admiration and scorn she sees in her friend’s eyes – it’s how she feels about him, after all. It’s how they all feel about him, handsome, arrogant Avaric, who is of course out of their league, but one never knows. (He isn’t out of Shenshen’s league. Shenshen takes great pains to deliberately not point this out to them.) Even Boq doesn’t seem quite immune to his charm.

She gossips about Shenshen with Pfannee, and about both of them with Milla, and doesn’t think about who’s gossiping with whom about _her_. The three of them together gossip about everyone else. They talk about their studies insofar as they discuss the teachers, and how sophisticated all of Shiz is, and what a wonderful opportunity, to experience university life at their young age, and first-hand!

“If only one didn’t have to _learn_ so much,” Pfannee huffs, sprawled out on top of her mattress with her feet in Milla’s lap. “You think now you have read everything that could possibly have been written on one single topic, and just as you’ve reached the last sentence they whip out the next book to immediately disprove all you’ve just learned. What’s the point?”

Galinda idly flicks at a page of _The Science and the Sorcery of the Sophisticated Mind_ , back and forth, back and forth. “You’d think by now we’d be done with it. I’m sure not even half of what we’re told is even important – is it even worth it to be told ninety-nine unimportant things for every relevant titbit?”

“I suspect it’s less about teaching us as many important facts as possible, and more about… oh, teaching us how to think about things, that sort of thing,” Milla says with a yawn before reaching over with a half-hearted glare to pluck the noisy book from Galinda’s hands.

“I know well enough how to think, thank you very much,” Galinda points out. “I never got that impression from Morrible, anyway. If she wanted us to think and have opinions, she might do well to actually let us have opinions, instead of expecting us to simply parrot her own opinions back at her, don’t you think?”

Shenshen, who has been slowly combing her hair with a bored expression, tosses her locks artfully over her shoulder. “I, for one, am not here in order to have opinions,” she declares. “I’m here to broaden my horizon, and improve my chances for the future ahead of me.”

She means her future in marriage, of course, and the other three laugh heartily and agree with her, although Milla doesn’t look at Shenshen as she does so and Galinda feels something bubbling up behind her laugh that she doesn’t dare give voice to.

It should have been her, leading their little group, confidently ending such nonsensical discussions. She’s come to Shiz because she’s smart, yes, but she harbours no illusions as to the subjects of her education granting her any advantage. Having studied will make her more sophisticated, more appealing for influential men looking for marriage – it’s the reason she’s here. It’s the reason most of them are here. But somewhere along the way, her vision of the future has gotten knocked the slightest bit askew, her hopes and ideas just a little out of sync with reality.

She thinks of her roommate, whom she’d left behind with a quill and note paper and reading, always reading, as she skipped out of their dorm to meet her friends. Elphaba. Elphaba who, behind closed doors, entices her into the strangest discussions more often than not these days. Always safely hidden away from the real world, Elphaba challenges her, asks about Galinda’s thoughts and opinions and wheedles and pushes until Galinda finds to her great surprise that she _has_ opinions. If asked, she couldn’t explain it, but it feels _wrong_. Dangerous. She flees Elphaba’s company, her curt excuse met with a too-wide, too-knowing grin, and finds another opinion two or three days thereafter.

Perhaps one of these days, she’ll come to Elphaba with a declaration of her own, turn the tables and see what the strange girl makes of _that_.

* * *

**Alone**

Nessarose is grieving, Nanny says, but even her eyes shine with disapproval as she speaks to Glinda. She’s taking it to heart, more than she wants to let on. It’s better not to take her accusations personally, duckie, she will regret her words soon, and punish herself more than enough for it, Nanny says, and holds Glinda’s hands tight in her old, shrivelled ones. It’s probably meant to be an apology of sorts.

Glinda doesn’t care. The words wash over her as she nods, and smiles, and retreats to her own part of the accommodations, and doesn’t look over to Elphaba’s side.

Nessa thinks that Elphaba has chosen her, chosen _Glinda,_ over her sister. It’s an understandable anger, if misplaced. Yes, Glinda was the one whom Elphaba had taken with her to the Emerald City, but choice had nothing to do with it. Elphaba had to go. Despite her best efforts and wishes, Elphaba could not go alone. Whom could she have taken? Nessarose, her delicate little sister – endanger her, incriminate her alongside herself, ruin any social and political chances she might ever have; not to mention that Nessa would have protested every step of the way and downright refused? Fiyero, the shy foreign prince, who was married to his child bride and had a whole clan depending on him back in the Vinkus, Fiyero who still hadn’t even quite found his footing at Shiz – throw him into the Capital, a representative of a just-short-of-oppressed country, unwillingly made to challenge the Great Wizard himself? Or Avaric, maybe, whose dislike of Elphaba was mutual and no secret and who might have the capacity to care about people beyond himself, if he only thought to try, or Boq, who wasn’t-- there’s no point. No, Glinda was the only option, with just the right amount of self-importance even now still, not influential enough to have her prospects all too endangered, but well-versed in high society and, and _moral support_ or whatever those sleepless nights meant.

Although that might not be the choice that Nessa meant. In her mind, Elphaba should have chosen not to take _her_ along instead, but to not leave at all – should have chosen to stay with Nessarose, as is her duty, as she always has in the past. Because for all her sisterly claimy, Nessarose doesn’t see that for Elphaba, there was no such choice. She had borne all the injustice she could bear, and when she could no longer bear it, she left, and now she is gone.

Still, Glinda understands. Her own thoughts mirror Nessa’s closely enough.

 _It should have been me_. What Nessa doesn’t understand is that Elphaba hasn’t chosen Glinda, either. That Glinda is left behind the same way, or even more so – she was _there_ , within arms reach, such an easy choice to make. She understands, she thinks, why Elphaba didn’t make it, but that doesn’t make it hurt any less, and it doesn’t make the quiet, sizzling anger disappear.

* * *

**Regret**

There isn’t… much, once the Good Witch steps dainty foot inside the castle. Not much to see. Not much to _do_. Nothing at all, if she’s honest with herself, but she doesn’t know if she’s trying to be. It’s no use to close one’s eyes to keep out reality – the Good Witch knows this. It’s been a hard lesson to learn, and one that took her longer than she would ever admit. But she also knows, now, that ignorance is indeed bliss, and at times she longs for the bliss of her youth.

Ignorance, here and now, is not a choice available to her.

No sparkles adorn her dress, none of the pomp and showiness the citizens of Oz expect of her, no colour at all to bring a spark of life and light into the drab, grey halls of Kiamo Ko. She fits right in, with her drab, grey frock that she wouldn’t be caught dead in. But she isn’t dead, and here she is.

The castle greets her with the echo of her own footsteps, and the echo of monkey chatter that she may or may not be imagining, and the echo of voices that belong to people who are – who aren’t here any longer, that she is almost certainly imagining. Still she flinches, pivots towards the source of the not-sound, her numb heart lurching at the not-there voice speaking not-there words that she can almost, _almost_ make out. A scream doesn’t ring out from far above her in the tower as she climbs the stairs. It’s not long and drawn-out and it doesn’t fade into a choked off whimper before it cuts out, and it doesn’t freeze the marrow of the Good Witch’s bones because it isn’t there at all, isn’t audible, isn’t real. Even so, it does make her stop to clutch at her ears, press her forehead against the rough stone until the sound ceases not to be heard.

Her citizens may never know what she has found, up in that lonely tower room so befitting of a wicked witch. Her citizens may never know she came here at all, that she walked, with bare feet and a numb heart and a frock below even the dress of a commoner, up a beaten spiral case of stone steps towards an empty room filled with nothing anyone would deem of worth. That she knelt, amidst all that remained of the formidable Wicked Witch of the West, and did not move for hours as she silently begged for forgiveness she would never receive and never deserve. That, when the hour was late enough to be early, the numbness in her heart finally gave way to breathless tears that wiped away the last remnants of what they might have recognised as their Good Witch of the North and left only Glinda, breathless and screaming and as flustered and uncomely as any other Ozian in the face of such grief.

 _It should have been me._ The thought comes unbidden as she finally picks herself off the floor with wobbly legs, but she knows it to be true. If any of the monkeys had remained, they’ve flown off by now, driven away by her noisy and clustery presence in their mistress’s lair. She remains alone as she wipes her face with a dark, rough sleeve that covers her hand up to the fingertips when she lets it fall. She clutches the fabric closer, pretends it feels like another hand in hers.

It was never Elphaba who poisoned the land of Oz, a land whose upper classes thought they could extinguish pain and injustice by blaming innocents, by locking all its ugly bits and pieces out of sight and pretending they couldn’t see them when they protruded from the seams and oozed from the gaps like tar, like pus from a festering wound. Of course – Glinda had never locked anyone up, had she? It wasn’t _her_ fault if people broke the law so carelessly, it wasn’t _her_ fault when they refused to obey their head of state, their Wonderful Wizard, it wasn’t _her_ fault if they weren’t sensible enough to see that he only wanted what was best for them all, the silly things. It wasn’t her fault if they couldn’t be satisfied with their place in life, now was it? And Glinda closed her eyes with a smile, and waved to the adoring masses and gave the rousing, cheery speeches that were handed to her, and pretended she couldn’t see. And Elphaba, instead of being content, caused a fuss and pointed her bony green fingers at neat little seams and accused them of being sticky with overflowing tar, and it was no wonder she got in trouble for it, was it? Of course people would react badly. Of course people would want her gone.

No. No, Elphaba should never have been the one to attract all that fury, that hatred. But Glinda refused to look, refused to see, and all the political power it presumably brought her cannot mend the shattered tatters of a life she allowed to end while too many others, so much less deserving of it, are allowed to continue.

Untouched by the first light of the morning sun, Glinda the Good descends a narrow, dusky staircase. Her steps are steady despite the invisible burden weighing her down, and the salty tracks have been diligently erased, her flaxen curls neatly patted into shape. She will leave the abandoned castle without looking back and return to her home unnoticed with its looming silhouette still domineering the back of her mind, a place it will never entirely relinquish. She will change out of the shapeless frock and return it, gently, to its space at the bottom of a locked drawer, before she painstakingly puts on heavy layers of eggshell white and glittering blue.

She has made a promise, and she will keep it.

* * *

**Forward**

Politics are thankless work, no matter what people would have you believe, and never more so than when you wish to right wrongs that have been given too much time to fester. Those who have been wronged will be slow to give you their trust, or withhold it completely, and you have no right to begrudge their hesitation. Those who have benefited from the wrongs committed will be understandably angry at the loss of their privilege. Less understandably, they will be angry at being asked to treat those they have wronged with kindness, as equals. The Good Witch knows this. It is a lesson she learns anew every day, and has learned for years now. She has made her peace with the fact that she cannot please everyone, and that she will never be done learning.

There are lines in her face that she does not bother trying to conceal with paint and flattering lighting. Laugh lines, around her eyes and mouth, and lines of sorrow, of pain and worry between her eyebrows and on her forehead. There are spots of blue on her eyelids, still, and a sparkling tiara in her greying curls that matches the glittering blue of her gown. It’s no use changing all of yourself just because you want to change the world, after all. But there’s no use either in pretending to be more than anyone can rightfully expect of you.

Oz will continue to change once she is gone, she knows. She hopes. Her work is far from done, and she doubts it will be within her lifetime. She is doing her best, though, and hopes that it is enough.

She does not pray. The Unnamed God has never proven himself to be of help to anyone, and wide-eyed children have called Glinda a fairy queen too often as that she can put much faith in Lurline.

The audience is quiet as she speaks. She has written the words herself, showed them to an advisor to edit out any awkwardness and clumsy phrasings, but made sure the meaning remains unchanged. Her gaze drifts over humans and Animals alike, somewhat separated still, but mingling, side by side, equal. One of the few Quadling women in attendance is whispering something to a Munchkinlander, who shushes her with her elbow but barely contains a grin. The representatives of the Arjiki watch her with bright eyes and unreadable faces.

It isn’t perfect. There’s still leaking tar, jarringly obvious as it sticks to Oz’s structure, still rough and hasty seams in need of mending, or of cutting open and redoing entirely. Some places look worse than before – you need to get all the ugliness of a wound out in the open before it can start to heal. But Glinda is no longer closing her eyes, and hasn’t been for a long time. She asks her fellow Ozians to do the same.

As she finishes her speech, as the people assembled below her podium applaud and cheer, a flash of green in the corner of her eyes makes her heart lurch painfully in her chest. She doesn’t turn her head, though it hurts to disregard her yearning. Instead, she smiles brightly at her audience. She tries to look at everyone individually, to show them that they are seen. She keeps her hands clasped in front of her and does not reach out to the side, to someone who isn’t there.

The applause, she knows, though they don’t, is not for her. Shouldn’t be for her. She will collect it, however, hold it in her heart until she can give Elphaba the praise that she is due, because it should not be Glinda, standing on that stage and receiving praise for her Goodness.

 _It should have been you_.

**Author's Note:**

> I never *posted* any of my old Wicked fic on here! Keep planning to, keep not doing it. If you want, you can check it out over on good ol' fanfictiondotnet where I'm the same username just without spaces (aka Caricature of a Witch), but there's no guarantee for quality bc wow it's been a while.
> 
> Let me know what you think and/or hit me up on Tumblr where, surprise, I'm @caricatureofawitch!


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